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A call for a broadened environmental movement that addresses issues of everyday life. In Environmentalism Unbound, Robert Gottlieb proposes a new strategy for social and environmental change that involves reframing and linking the movements for environmental justice and pollution prevention. According to Gottlieb, the environmental movement's narrow conception of environment has isolated it from vital issues of everyday life, such as workplace safety, healthy communities, and food security, that are often viewed separately as industrial, community, or agricultural concerns. This fragmented approach prevents an awareness of how these issues are also environmental issues. After tracing a history of environmental perspectives on land and resources, city and countryside, and work and industry, Gottlieb focuses on three compelling examples of this new approach to social and environmental change. The first involves a small industry (dry cleaning) and the debate over pollution prevention approaches; the second involves a set of products (janitorial cleaning supplies) that may be hazardous to workers; and the third explores the obstacles and opportunities presented by community or regional approaches to food supply in the face of an increasingly globalized food system.
Anyone interested the future of environmentalism will find this book an invaluable guide.
Why are our environmental problems still growing despite a huge increase in global conservation efforts? Peterson del Mar untangles this paradox by showing how prosperity is essential to environmentalism. Industrialization drove people to look for meaning in nature even as they consumed its products more relentlessly. Hence England led the way in both manufacturing and preserving its countryside, and the United States created a matchless set of national parks as it became the world's pre-eminent economic and military power. Environmental movements have produced some impressive results, including cleaner air and the preservation of selected species and places. But agendas that challenged western prosperity and comfort seldom made much progress, and many radical environmentalists have been unabashed utopianists. Environmentalism considers a wide range of conservation and preservation movements and less organized forms of nature loving (from seaside vacations to ecotourism) to argue that these activities have commonly distracted us from the hard work of creating a sustainable and sensible relationship with the environment.
After considering the historical roots of environmentalism from the 1890s through the 1960s, Gottlieb discusses the rise and consolidation of environmental groups in the years between Earth Day 1970 and Earth Day 1990. A comprehensive analysis of the origins of the environmental movement within the American experience.
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the environmental movement experienced a quiet revolution. In This is Our Land, Cody Ferguson documents this little-noted change as he describes the efforts of three representative grassroots groups—in Montana, Arizona, and Tennessee—revealing how quite ordinary citizens fought to solve environmental problems. Here are stories of common people who, confronting environmental threats to the health and safety of their families and communities, bonded together to protect their interests. These stories include successes and failures as citizens learned how to participate in their democracy and redefined what participation meant. Equally important, Ferguson describes how several laws passed in the seventies—such as the National Environmental Policy Act—gave citizens the opportunity and the tools to fight for the environment. These laws gave people a say in the decisions that affected the world around them, including the air they breathed, the water they drank, the land on which they made their living, and the communities they called home. Moreover, Ferguson shows that through their experiences over the course of the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, these citizen activists broadened their understanding of “this is our land” to mean “this is our community, this is our country, this is our democracy, and this is our planet.” As they did, they redefined political participation and expanded the ability of citizens to shape their world. Challenging us to see activism in a new way, This is Our Land recovers the stories of often-unseen citizens who have been vitally important to the environmental movement. It will inspire readers to confront environmental threats and make our world a safer, more just, and more sustainable place to live.
In Skeptical Environmentalism, Robert Kirkman raises doubts about the speculative tendencies elaborated in environmental ethics, deep ecology, social ecology, postmodern ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental pragmatism. Drawing on skeptical principles introduced by David Hume, Kirkman takes issue with key tenets of speculative environmentalism, namely that the natural world is fundamentally relational, that humans have a moral obligation to protect the order of nature, and that understanding the relationship between nature and humankind holds the key to solving the environmental crisis. Engaging the work of Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Rousseau, and Heidegger, among others, Kirkman reveals the relational worldview as an unreliable basis for knowledge and truth claims, and, more dangerously, as harmful to the intellectual sources from which it takes inspiration. Exploring such themes as the way knowledge about nature is formulated, what characterizes an ecological worldview, how environmental worldviews become established, and how we find our place in nature, Skeptical Environmentalism advocates a shift away from the philosopher's privileged position as truth seeker toward a more practical thinking that balances conflicts between values and worldviews.
Victor Scheffer writes of a social revolution. Environmentalism began as a revelation that the resources supporting life are limited and that men and women can--if they act wisely and soon--reduce their material demands and their numbers before limits are reached and the richness of human existence is diminished forever. The revelation grew into a revolution driven by a morality of life or death for the human race. Environmentalism is not a word deeply rooted in the American vernacular. It was seldom used before the appearance of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962, although warnings about the environment had been sounded earlier. It has roots in conservation--the preservation and careful use of natural resources--and in ecology--the study of the relastionships between these roots. It describes areas of major concern to environmentalists in the sixties and seventies, ranging from wasted croplands and forests through endangered species to birth control. It reports progress on three fronts: educational, legal, and political. Richly anecdotal, the book is an informal history of a generation of aroused citizens who began to see their outdoor surroundings--and indeed all of Planet Earth--in a new light. The formative years of the movement-1960 to 1980-are central to the narrative. By 1980 environmentalism as a social science, a field of political management, a philosophy, and to many a religion, was firmly in place. The movement met with notable setbacks during the Reagan years, however, and Scheffer concludes his narrative with an epilogue highlighting environmental events from 1981 to 1989. Although veterans of the movement will find much in the book familiar territory, they will welcome the broad coverage of crises, decisions, and laws that set the stage for environmental victories. As a new generation joins the environmental movement, the book will help them understand the moral impetus that gave birth to environmentalism and the public awareness and concern for change that grew with the movement.
Traces the history of the environmental movement from its beginnings as private clubs, to the activism of the 1960s and 1970s, to the corporate sellout of the 1990s. Unveils the stories behind American environmentalism's undeniable triumphs and its quite unnecessary failures.
Environmentalism has become a hot button political topic. When leadership teams create an impression, one way or the other, that the Earth is in trouble, we need to pay attention. This valuable resource presents simple facts about the history of environmentalism in America, and why it exists. It examines the science behind certain assertions, and teaches readers about new issues, and new solutions.